Skip to main content

Data Center Quick Check is Down Again!

The MacDar Data Center Quick Check is a free tool which has been put up to give us visibility of the results of searches over several of Google's Data Centers and we have made reference to it from time to time over the last few months.

As Google watchers are only too aware new developments are tested by Google on particular data centers before being rolled out across the whole network. As these data centers have different URLs it is possible to search on them directly.

Big Daddy is referred to as an infrastructure change and is possibly linked to a major upgrade of Googlebot. Even with Jagger there were several phases to the algorithm updates which were tested and then release quite quickly over successive weeks. Big Daddy has been rolled out to a few centers from the first two where it was announced but I think we have also seen some roll back. The three exceptional surges measured by Rankpulse.com are suggestive of this sort of activity although they have made no comment so far. This is not too surprising with an infrastructure upgrade - it wouldn't be too surprising if there were some hardware, network and software variations at some of the data centers which reacted differently to the new stuff. We should just be grateful that Google have a robust distributed system and effective change control processes and be patient.

Never the less, every day we have been doing a quick check on a few of our keywords where we know that Big Daddy is making a difference but we have been thwarted this week because the link to their 'business' end at sleeping-bag.com has not been working. I don't suppose it is sinister - there have been similar downtime periods in the past. We'll keep you posted.

Popular posts from this blog

Adding to the collection or ...

There are more opportunities to add to this collection but we think that it is now time to make some additional payment options available. For low cost items, credit card transactions are rather expensive so we will need to trade the benefits to us of larger orders against a premium for individual track purchases. This means adding shopping cart facilities along side the simple BitPass functionality and is going to be a bit of a programming challenge. More of this anon - in the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - first movement of No3 from Johann Sebastian Bach himself and our arrangement on steel drums and marimba - full HiFi track only 0.99$(US).
Read more

Shop Re-opens

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again. I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making. In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.
Read more

Out of Beta

Blogger is out of beta and that was pretty painless. The new features look quite interesting so we'll give them a go shortly. No collaborators on the search engine yet so I think we'll do a page on the main site and see what we can achieve from there. My news group post killed the thread I responded to - so nothing from that source either. An index page update was picked up by Google the following day so we seem to have all that part of the system sorted and I finally got round to tidying up the title and description so that might generate more responses. We are ending the year on over 2000 visitors a week on the main site but not many on this blog - I'm really doing it for my personal benefit now but it helps to imagine that anyone could come along and read it. In fact I suspect that we have far more readers of individual pages thrown up by searches than we do regular readers.
Read more